Responsible Kids Network - Children and Email

Children and E-mail

Parents should sit down with their children and spend the time getting to know the areas of the Internet that their children are using. Simple activities like sending e-mail to your children with funny stories or educational Web sites attached may help you understand how your children have their e-mail accounts set up. You'll be able to see if your children have revealed any personal or sensitive information in their e-mail header (name, address or other personal information). This will also give you a chance to assess your child's knowledge of the details of setting up the e-mail account. Many veteran e-mailers have changed the entire look of their e-mail, including the background, colors, and fonts. Many have their e-mail program set-up to request a return receipt, which sends back a confirmation message when the recipient has opened his/her e-mail.

When your children want to establish their first e-mail account (maybe as young as six or seven years old), try doing it together. The name of the account can be DadandSon@whatever.com. By doing this you'll be able to teach your children appropriate use of an e-mail account, while monitoring the type of content that is sent and received from the account. For instance, your child may get on a mailing list of a commercial Web site and your e-mail account is then bombarded with commercial advertisements and promotion. By having a joint e-mail account, parents will be able to spot potential trouble sooner, rather than later.

Parents need to teach their children not to submit their e-mail address to every "cool" and colorful Web promotion that they encounter. Web sites will offer many incentives to entice a user to enter his/her e-mail address.

Setting up a joint e-mail account will also help you monitor any inappropriate mail sent to the account unsolicited. Unsolicited e-mail is referred to as "spam". Parents are continually amazed at the amount of adult content or other inappropriate material that is sent to their children's e-mail accounts without anyone asking for it. Even the largest Internet Service Providers that tout state-of-the-art content-filtering software are still penetrated by these types of spammers.

It is crucial for parents to teach children the importance of observing netiquette when composing e-mail. Many times composing e-mail somehow causes users to communicate in a different way than they would if they were speaking face to face with the other person. It is important that children realize e-mail is a tool for communicating and should not affect the way the message is presented. Like any other written message, the words of each e-mail will hang there almost permanently, meaning great care should be taken to check spelling and grammar, and to make sure the tone of the e-mail is one that the sender intended. Many times, a user sends over-emotional or "flaming" e-mail, only to seem a bit exaggerated or even inflammatory by the recipient

There are numerous other ways you and your child can have e-mail accounts, many of which are independent of your Internet Service Provider. Many of the Internet's most popular Web sites offer free e-mail accounts that are accessed from the Web site. These accounts are even easier to establish than the already-simple-to-set-up accounts offered by your Internet Service Provider. Internet Web sites like Yahoo, Hotmail, CNN and ESPN (plus hundreds of others) will allow users to pick an e-mail nickname and maintain an e-mail account, free of charge, on the Web site's servers.

There are many advantages to this type of e-mail account and some disadvantages, as well. One of the best things about these Web site e-mail accounts is that users can access e-mail from any computer. Since this type of account is maintained at the Internet Web site, any computer or browser that accesses the World Wide Web can be used to get to the e-mail box. This is not the case with an e-mail account through an Internet Service Provider. If you are out of town on business or vacation or just not at your computer at the time you need to send or receive e-mail, your e-mail account through your Internet Service Provider may prove extremely restrictive and limiting.

Other advantages include not having to worry about hackers sending a virus attached to any e-mail. The e-mail offered by these Web sites is not actually downloaded to a user's computer, like it is when e-mail is received through an Internet Service Provider. Rather, the messages are viewed from the Web site's servers, thus eliminating a chance something destructive can slip onto the computer's hard drive.

The anonymity of these accounts can provide useful, too. Many Web sites will ask visitors to register an e-mail address with them in order to take advantage of any free information or services that may be providedat the site. As parents and their children become more involved with using the wealth of information available on the Internet, they will find they will have to register an e-mail address at most Web sites.

When establishing a relatively anonymous e-mail account at a popular Web site, it is suggested that users do not use their real name, but rather create an alternate online identity. Although many Web site operators may claim that they frown upon this, most Web sites are more concerned with how to reach you, rather than actually who you are. The main reason Web sites require visitors to register an e-mail address is to be able to send promotional information about their Web site and use the e-mail address to increase their subscriber numbers for potential investors and/or advertisers. Most Web sites won't be concerned that you may have registered as "Mickey Mouse," using a bogus street address, as long as you provide a valid e-mail address.